By 2015, the U.S. Postal Service is expected to be losing money at a rate of $20 billion a year. But the Post Office has a plan intended to help stop the bleeding -- or at least slow it down. Next week, it will begin testing a new same-day delivery service called "Metro Post."

Black Friday has been around for decades, but in the last several years, the holiday shopping season has gained a number of additional "special" shopping days. So if you're looking for the right days for deals, (or when to avoid the crowds) here's a run-down of all the retail deal days worth knowing.

Every Friday, we scan the weekly ads, deal sites and retailer marketing emails to find the best deals available for the coming week. Here are a few of the best freebies and limited-time offers we found.

Chevron shares dropped 4.2 percent to $112.45 after it said third-quarter profits would be "substantially lower" than the previous quarter, while Alcoa fell 4.6 percent to $8.71 after it posted a quarterly loss. The company cut its outlook for global aluminum demand, citing a slowdown in China.

Apple has finally introduced the iPhone 5. Smartphone fans and Apple investors are naturally excited: The very nature of the shiny new handset and the bar-raising nature of some of its features will send out ripples far beyond Cupertino.

If you ask the postmaster general, saving the Post Office will require shutting down one out of three post offices, laying off tens of thousands of postal workers, and ending Saturday mail delivery. Trouble is, he's wrong.

The cash-strapped U.S. Postal Service said Monday it is seeking to move quickly to close 252 mail processing centers and slow first-class delivery next spring, citing steadily declining mail volume. The cuts are part of $3 billion in reductions aimed at helping the agency avert bankruptcy next year.

In a joint effort with PayPal, Facebook launched a new app this week that could remake the money-transfer business. We test drove Send Money, a cheap -- sometimes free -- method for moving funds between you and members of your social network.

If the USPS went into bankruptcy, would anyone care? Not according to former UPS board member Gary MacDougal, who argued in a scathing attack last week that "the rapid growth of email, online bill paying," and private parcel delivery firms like UPS and FedEx has made the Post Office obsolete. Statistics suggest he's right.

As the U.S. Postal Service works feverishly to close its budget gap, UPS is taking advantage of the turmoil to highlight how much more innovative its brown-clad couriers can be, compared to their blue-suited cousins.

Now that the skies are clearing after the worst economic storm in modern history -- far more violent than the experts had predicted -- we face a surprising new roster of winners and losers, as Fortune's 2011 ranking of the World's Most Admired Companies makes clear.

Once a clearly defined term that meant "to use force to compel or control a physical thing," drive has become one of the most insidious and overused buzzwords in the lexicon. Often now, what's being driven is intangible, and the mechanics of what's doing the driving are a mystery. So, who's driving this buzzword train, anyway?